Wine 8.21 Released With HiDPI Scaling & Initial Vulkan Code For The Wayland Driver

Wine 8.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and the final one prior to the feature freeze coming up in two weeks.

Notable with the Wine 8.21 release is the continued work on the Wine Wayland driver. This native Wayland support for Wine now includes initial HiDPI scaling support as well as the initial Vulkan support. The Vulkan support isn't yet fully usable but is working on getting all the pieces in order and will be interesting to see what more squeezes into the Wine Wayland driver prior to the code freeze for Wine 9.0.

Collabora's Alexandros Frantzis is doing a great job on the Wine Wayland driver and getting all of the pieces upstream. HiDPI is certainly important with today's displays and the Vulkan support is important for modern Windows games expected to work with Wine on Wayland.

Also significant with Wine 8.21 is the start of supporting the ARM64EC target. ARM64EC is a new ABI for Windows 11 apps on Arm. ARM64EC is for "Emulation Compatible" and is for helping to build new native apps or incrementally moving from x64 apps to native ARM64. More details on ARM64EC can be found via the Microsoft documentation. This Wine 8.21 state of ARM64EC is just the very early start of eyeing support for this functionality.

Wine 8.21 also has updates to the locale database and around 29 known bug fixes. The bug fixes range from Wayland driver fixes to Direct3D 10 issues resolved to various game and application fixes.

Downloads and more details on today's Wine 8.21 development release via WineHQ.org.